BIO:
Liz Worth’s second book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk Rock in Toronto and Beyond 1977-1981 is now in it’s third pressing. Available from Montreal’s Bongo Beat Books, the response to Worth’s visceral collected interviews of the punk music scene in its earliest stages are really striking a chord with those involved and inspired by the community. Treat Me Like Dirt… has found an audience with a younger crowd eager to discover a scene they don’t really know about full of larger than life characters and anti-heroes who robbed by day and rocked by night. The true stories are so unbelievable that the book reads like a novel, though it’s entirely non-fiction.
Treat Me Like Dirt… is a story assembled from individual personal stories that go beyond the usual “we played here, this famous person saw us there” and into sex, drugs, murder, conspiracy, booze, criminals, biker gangs, violence, art (yes, art), and includes one of the last interviews with the late Frankie Venom (singer of Teenage Head). Truly uncensored, this is the 1977 Toronto punk explosion at its finest as told by the bands and others who were there.Treat Me Like Dirt… captures the personalities that drove the original Toronto punk scene. This is the first book to document histories of the Diodes, Viletones, and Teenage Head, along with other bands (B-Girls, Curse, Demics, Dishes, Forgotten Rebels, Johnny & The G-Rays, The Mods, The Poles, Simply Saucer, The Ugly, etc.) and fans that brought the punk scene to life in Toronto. Told in the voices of those who were there, this book is a punk rock road map, chalk full of chaos, betrayal, pain, disappointments, failure, success, and the pure rock n roll energy that frames this layered history of punk in Toronto and beyond.
National Post, Exclaim!, and Spinner.com are already buzzing about the book. Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham mentioned it as “Last Great Book I Read” on Pitchfork.
LINKS:
http://lizworth.com
http://bongobeat.com
CONTACT:
kate(@)audioblood.com
